TESTIMONIES TO THE NEAR FUTURE

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.

ITALO CALVINO’S Invisible Cities unfolds as a surreal and philosophical dialogue between Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan. The book tells of fifty-five fantastical places, – cities shaped less by geography than by memory, longing, fear, language and time. Although the internet age was still in its infancy when Calvino’s book was published in 1972, Cao Fei’s work exists somewhere between its imagined dialogue and the consequences of rapid urbanisation, technological expansion, changing labour conditions and the emergence of virtual life. There is something special about seeing a city from high above, a moment when it almost seems possible to grasp all the lives being lived at once, something otherwise difficult to do while absorbed in the closeness of it all.

Everything unfolds across the grid of streets, buildings, governments, and sites of encounter, constantly shifting. It is something we all experience without ever fully understanding its complexity. The Chinese artist Cao Fei has found a way to take us deep into the urban membrane, while also allowing us to zoom out and shift perspectives we once thought were set like concrete. While journeying through some of her real and imagined cities, we encounter documentary fragments merging with speculative elements; real places become dreamscapes, and cities become psychological and social architectures. Cao Fei understands the city not merely as infrastructure, but as an accumulation of desires, projections, contradictions, and memories.

Speculation therefore becomes less an escape into futurism than an artistic strategy for understanding the present, moving between cyber-futurism, magical realism (think of her giant octopus), documentary observation, and social critique. Since Cao Fei began working in the late 1990s, digital culture has transformed radically – from early online anonymity to today’s immersive and algorithmically mediated realities. Her works ask how humans emotionally inhabit technological systems, and how imagination persists within structures increasingly shaped by automation, surveillance, and virtual participation. And like Calvino’s imagined cities printed between pages, Cao Fei’s worlds remain suspended between prophecy and memory, impossibility and realism, they are testimonies to a near future continuously unfolding around us.

NISHA MERIT The city is a major protagonist in your work constantly transforming, haunted by memory, yet oriented toward the future. What fascinates you about urban spaces as both a physical environment and a site for imagination?

CAO FEI What fascinates me most about the city is its perpetually unfinished, ever-renewing state – like a giant film set, torn down at any moment and rebuilt according to new narratives. As a result, everything and everyone feels on the verge of disappearing: urban villages, factories, old cinemas. In RMB City, I compressed the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Bird’s Nest (Beijing National Stadium), dams, and urban villages into a single virtual city. It is a rhapsody of urbanisation and a deconstruction of spatial power. The city is always haunted by memories of the past; before we can fully savour them, it is already rushing toward a new future.

NM Your work often exists in an in between state of documentary and fiction, the digital and the physical, reality and speculation. It feels to me as if you managed to create the glitch as a space itself. Why is the in between world so important to you as an artist?

CF I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, a period when China itself was caught in a dramatic in – between – state between old buildings and skyscrapers, planned economy and market economy, local culture and pop culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan. All these opposites were compressed into the same time and space. I am not satisfied with pure documentary truth, nor with mere fiction. Because no single perspective is enough to describe this indescribable world. Reality itself is already magical enough. When I film factories, urban villages, and logistics warehouses, I do not see the social spaces I inhabit or the subjects I focus on as glitched or distorted. We must understand their condition as a kind of naturality. The constant complexities that emerge dynamically amid rapid social development are highly contradictory yet co- existent and unified. They are full of vitality and change, yet also bring frustration, loss, and even tears. All of this drives me to explore and express tirelessly.

NM Across works like Whose Utopia and your projects in the video game Second Life, you explore the relationship between virtual communities and phys- ical realities. What can virtual worlds reveal about human desires, labour, and identity that the physical world sometimes cannot?

CF When I filmed Whose Utopia in 2006, I had workers perform their dreams inside real factories. Later, I entered the virtual world of Second Life as my avatar China Tracy, and discovered that the anonymity of identity lays bare human desires more unapologetically. Virtual worlds have labour, love, and people who make a living selling digital skins, virtual organs, and digital real estate. They act like a prism that refracts the invisible digital labour of globalisation. Today, a single click on an e-commerce platform triggers a chain reaction: cross-border production, all the way to the courier’s last-mile dash. That is why I created Asia One in 2018, an artwork about the shift toward digital consumption. It compresses real labour, emotional fantasy, and consumer desire into a single interface – something rarely visible all at once in the physical world.

NM China Tracy has accompanied your practice as an alter ego moving through digital space. How has this character evolved over the years, and what does she represent to you now?

CF I created China Tracy in Second Life in 2006. At first, she was like an awkward anthropologist, exploring the unknown world on my behalf and capturing that strange, melancholic encounter in i.Mirror (2007). Gradually, she became a builder, involved in the planning of RMB City, and also a documentarian. Today, everyone has countless online avatars, and such overlaps are no longer novel. But to me, China Tracy is like a time capsule, pre- serving the naivety, rawness, and utopian impulses of the early internet. I still log in occasionally to check on her; she remains trapped in the digital ruins of a bygone era.

NM You combine references ranging from hip hop and remix culture to cyber futurism and magical realism. How has the idea of remixing – culturally, visually, or historically – influenced the way you construct your universes?

CF Youth subculture is embedded in the DNA of my practice. As a teenager, I listened to cutout CDs and danced street dance. All things, shifting symbols, trends, and histories can be recombined and recontextualised, sampled and thrown into a time blender. Rem Koolhaas once described the Pearl River Delta region where I grew up as “the city of exacerbated differences.” All my work takes place on this site of intense, emerging difference.

Until October 11, 2026, Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart presents CAO FEI: Testimonies to the Near Future — the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland and the largest survey exhibition of her work in Europe to date. In April 2026, Time named Cao Fei among the 100 most influential people of the year.

As featured in our new print issue SLEEK #89 – PLAY.

Credits: 

Creative Production: Hannes Aechter, Johanna Erdl

Special Thanks: Olivier Joliat